


If all the world and love were young

by Selden



Category: Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
Genre: F/M, no Marlowe-was-Shakespeare trutherism here, sorry Jarmusch I just can't buy it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-21
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-03-02 16:35:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2818895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selden/pseuds/Selden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vampires in space, in a foul smelling tavern, and among a great many variously plush and shining Edwardian objects. </p><p>In addition, some music of the spheres.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If all the world and love were young

**Author's Note:**

  * For [joy_shines](https://archiveofourown.org/users/joy_shines/gifts).



 

After Ava’s father refused her permission to apply to the Conservatoire in Paris, she sat down and played the piano for four hours. William Morris thrushes nodded their heads sadly together on the wallpaper as Elgar rose up through the brandy-flavoured Sunday air, past the collected works of Thackeray bound in Morocco leather, past the beady-eyed sparrowhawk in his glass case, to fold in sombre crenulations against the ceiling mouldings and resonate uneasily through every red brick, white enamel fitment, and green-glazed tile of the tall new house.

  
Ava’s father groaned and pulled his newspaper over his head.

  
“If she was possessed of genius we might consider it,” said Ava’s mother, “but as you can hear, that is not the case.” She sighed and repositioned her strings of amber beads across her capacious bosom.

  
The visiting European Expert nodded sagely and peered curiously into the shiny bowl of an elaborate meerschaum pipe. It was five o’clock on a winter Sunday and already quite dark. As all across London people lit their houses, the flame in the gas lamps grew, almost imperceptibly, a little weaker.

  
“LAUGHS AND FLAPS HIS HIDEOUS WINGS’ sang Ava in the morning room, ‘AND MAKES ME WILD WITH HORROR AND DISMAY”.

  
The European expert, who had mousy hair and steel-rimmed glasses, and who was also, as Ava’s mother put it, ‘at least a female if not quite precisely a lady, by our current standards,’ steepled her ink-stained fingers over her gently trembling teacup.

 

\--

 

“Oh, look, my darling,” said Eve, pointing. "Look."

  
The star at her finger-tip shuddered perceptibly and, half a solar system distant, let loose a howling arc of super-heated plasma, a wicked pulse of energy that, screaming out across the circling planets, left each great gas giant shining with fluorescence in its wake.

  
“It’s an extraordinary effect, isn’t it,” she said. “Only once or twice an old year, they say. And you have to translate the changes into the visible spectrum, of course.”

  
She patted the great lens of the flesh-ship in front of her, her long worn fingers entirely blocking out the distant sun.

  
“You did a wonderful job,” she told the ship. “Thank you so much.”

  
In her other hand, Adam’s grip tightened. Before them both, the glowing of the planets slowly faded, leaving only hanging crescents of reflected light.

 

\--

 

It was after Ava caught the European Expert in a compromising position with a housemaid that she decided to blackmail her.

  
“I have ambitions of my own, you see,” she told the Expert, spreading out her broderie anglais skirts across the plush of the sofa cushions and straightening the brown velvet bow in her hair. “I want to see the world and do wonderful things.”

  
“Your mother tells me you have received two very flattering offers,” said the Expert, who was opening up all the little flat drawers of Ava’s father’s cabinets and staring at the ranks of pinned-down beetles.

  
“I don’t want them,” said Ava. “I’m sure we can come to some arrangement.”

  
The Expert pursed her lips and opened another drawer. Inside were rows of hand-blown speckled eggs, grey and brown and blotched, all labelled with neat black ink and nestled in cotton wool in their own little compartments. As she bent down towards the eggs, light from the stained glass panes edging the study windows caught her face, colouring it a ghastly liquid red.

  
“I’ll wait for your decision,” said Ava. “But not for too long.”

 

\--

 

“More sack!” cried Eve, banging her cup against the table.

  
“Sack!” cried Kit Marlowe, wearing a ruffianish beard and a greasy velvet doublet,  and near a decade dead as far as most theatre-goers, theatre-players, booksellers, innkeepers, ingles, and spy-masters were concerned. “And no one else, my sweetling, gives a pinch of god’s piss for my whereabouts,” he told Eve, fluffing up his unfashionable whiskers and bringing down his own cup. “Sack! Sack for the men of the city!”

  
“Anon, good sirs,” threw an ostler over his shoulder, bearing dishes of evil-looking stewed prunes in both hands. “Anon!”

  
“Anon anon sirs,” said Kit, casting a rolling eye over the inn’s eating, drinking, smelling crowd. “And this is why men believed it when they said I had been spitted over an innkeeper’s reckoning. You’d never get serving men dawdling like this in Modena or sweet Venice.”

  
“Would you not, dear boy,” said Eve. “And you drinking my portion for good measure, for all that you need every poor shred of wits about you in these backbiting times." She looked before her, into the salt-blued flames of the fire. "I would not care to lose you, Kit," she said. "Some of us give a great deal more than - what was it you said? A pinch of God's piss?"

  
"A pinch of God's bulbous behind, my dear," leered Kit at her elbow, "and a piss in the channel out back. I'll be with you - anon."

  
He shoved his way out through the greasy crowd and set a sharp stream of urine cutting through the muck in the ditch at the back of the inn. Above him, behind the scrim of London smoke, the stars shone bright.

 

\--

 

"But what if it does let them know that we were awake?" asked Adam. "What would we do then?"

He was playing with an emulation of old editing software, jagged peaks of sound rolling before him across the ship's best effort at an early screen. Above him, the human inhabitants of the ship roosted in rows, dreaming within the greenish gelid pods that lined the walls.

"Well, we'd do the needful when we came to it, of course," said Eve's voice in his ear. "But you wouldn't rat us out, would you girl."

Miles away across the ship, where she floated in the warm darkness of a navigation lobe, Eve felt the ship's nerve gel shiver around her in agreement. She heard Adam sigh petulantly and thought, with familiar and awful fondness, of how he would be leaning forwards, frowning, leaning his serious young face towards his work.

"You're in with the sleepers, aren't you," she said. "It always makes you nervy."

"They _are_ unnerving."

"They're getting closer to us, you know," said Eve. "A bracing liquid diet, a life that spans centuries - "

"It doesn't exactly count when you're asleep," said Adam.

"Doesn't it?"

"Well, they're practically gift-wrapped for us at the moment, is all I can say. Rows of juice-boxes."

Eve's delighted laughter rang into Adam's ears.

"Oh, remember juice boxes! All those little children stabbing at cardboard boxes with their straws. I couldn't imagine what they were doing when I first saw them."

He could hear her smile, curling up her mouth, long and slow.

"You know," she continued, "Tyson-ji told me before we left that he still remembers the taste of mutton. Imagine that. And he doesn't look a day over seventy. We are close to becoming relics, you and I and all the others. And what, I wonder, will we watch these mortals become."

She turned slowly, feeling the ship's great bulk turn with her.

"Something really quite wonderful, I live to hope."

"I still remember the taste of mutton," Adam muttered. "And it was horrible."

 

\--

 

"Will you not take it from a woman, just this once, dear Kit," said Eve, speaking into the hollow of his ear.

Kit had returned from his piss with the stars behind his teeth, she could tell, ready for writing or rutting. It was in this mood she always hoped to turn him.

"Indeed," she said, "with me in my hose and jerkin you could scarce tell the difference."

"Oh, I'd know, sweet lady," said Kit. "Trust me, I'd know."

He sipped his wine thoughtfully; the ostler never had come with more sack.

"I think they've added slake-lime," he said, smacking his lips. "This paltry stuff strips the back of your throat like leavings from a whore's clyster pipe."

"You'd enjoy our night-drinks," said Eve. "It lights all of you up like fox-fire."

Kit smiled. "I intend to say yes in the end, my lady. I have a bet, after all, with that penny-pinching rogue of a glovemaker's son. He swears no-one could confuse our scribblings, but I know I have it in me to muddy the waters. A word or two in the right ear down the centuries, and I'll have men thinking his Hal sold his soul for a pitch at my Edward-the-buggered. When I come at last to buss my sweet Will in Elysium, he'll owe me a shilling and a suck at his cockhead."

Eve rolled her eyes and smiled. "Come live with me and be my love", she quoth, casting sly sidelong cow-eyes at Kit.

"And we will all the pleasures prove,

That Valleys, groves, hills, and field,

Woods, or steepy mountain yields."

Kit sniffed and stuck his nose up at the candle-ringed ceiling plaster.

"Softish boy-stuff," he announced. "I'm only irked I cannot tell Raleigh I read his reply."

"Poets," Eve said, "Men. You are still writing, aren't you, Kit?"

"Does the new king like a soft beard and a merry leg?"

"That's good to hear," said Eve. "Let a clever woman cast an eye on it sometime, hmm."

Kit grinned into his cup. The lime-spiked wine spun bubbles up at him like tiny stars.

"Wait for me, Eve," he said. "Time runs, I know, but life and wine are sweet."

 

\--

 

Ava first understood her mistake when she realised that the bites upon the housemaid's neck were rather deeper than she had at first supposed.

"What exactly are you an expert in?" she asked, carrying, despite her better judgement, a Tibetan ceremonial dagger (from her father's collection) tucked into her sash.

"Oh," said the European Expert, turning round from the bookcase, "a great many things. But only a few of them have anything much to do with the reason your mother asked me to come here."

She tutted and raised Ava's chin with a wide-knuckled finger.

"Don't look so grim, child," she said. "I'm here to show you the world, which is indeed full of wonderful things. You've only been turned for five years, after all, and your mother thinks you need a change of scene. People in London are starting to talk about your little indiscretions. You can meet my husband - I'm afraid he won't like you one bit, though - and we can even go to Paris."

"I was only going to ask you for money," said Ava. She ground one patent leather shoe into the thick plush carpet. "I want to create a work of genius."

"Well, give it a century or so," said the Expert. "Contrary to common belief, such things can be learnt."

All around her, the library gaslamps flickered higher in their bright green shades.

"My name is Eve, by the way," she said. "Pleased to meet you, Ava. I'm your sister."

 

\--

 

Beneath the sleeping mortal bodies, Adam and Eve move together in the endless night of deep space, their pale flesh marked out in sweet bites. Music rises through the air around them, filling out the flanks of the flesh-ship in great towering waves.

The music is a setting for a poem, almost a century old now, one of Ava's earliest works. Deep within the dreams of a sleeper high above them, Kit Marlowe's words shuffle in the underbrush of memory. The sleeper's lips move with the poem, unheard by the lovers below but recorded with care by the flesh-ship, softly repeating slow words to itself as it follows its course through the cosmos, leaving long radio trails of music and verse far behind it.

As it transpires, it is not young Kit's words but old Walter Raleigh's reply that the clever ship learns as it sails through the blackness.

 

 

 

But could youth last, and love still breed,

 Had joys no date, nor age no need,

 Then these delights my mind might move

 To live with thee, and be thy love.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The poems quoted are [The Passionate Shepherd to His Love](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173941) and [The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nymph%27s_Reply_to_the_Shepherd).


End file.
